“I do wish, Princey,” she told her mongrel friend, her single really close confidant, “that my papa and mamma were like the folks buried there behind the church,” and she sighed.
“I’d know just where they were, then. That part of ’em that’s dead, I mean. But now we don’t know much about it, do we?
“Being lost at sea is such a dreadful unsatisfactory way of having your folks dead.”
Uncle Joe and Aunty Rose loved her and were kind to her. But that feeling of “emptiness” that had at first so troubled Carolyn May was returning. Kind as her new friends here at The Corners and at Sunrise Cove were, there was something lacking in the little girl’s life.
Nothing could make up to her for the jolly companionship of her father. Even while his health was declining, he had made all about him happier by his own cheerful spirit. And the little girl longed, more and more, for her mother. She had followed her father’s axiom to “look up” and had benefited by it; but, at last, her loneliness and homesickness had become, it seemed, too great to endure.
She began to droop. Keen-eyed Aunty Rose discovered this physical change very quickly.
“She’s just like a droopy chicken,” declared the good woman, “and, goodness knows, I have seen enough of them.”
So, as a stimulant and a preventive of “droopiness,” Aunty Rose prescribed boneset tea, “plenty of it.” Now, she loved Carolyn May very much, even if she could not bring herself to the point of showing her affection before others; but boneset tea is an awful dose!
Carolyn May took the prescribed quantity and shook all over. She could not bear the taste of bitter things, and this boneset, or thoroughwort, had the very bitterest taste she had ever encountered.
“Do—do you think it’s good for me, Aunty Rose?” she asked quaveringly.